


Of All the Gin Joints

by Wynn



Category: Supernatural, Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Gen, Newly uploaded to AO3, Older Fic, and liquor, and reluctant saving, and sass galore, some naughty language, there is pool
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-21 19:46:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/904164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wynn/pseuds/Wynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester and Logan Echolls cross paths in a bar. Set post-S2 for Veronica Mars and between "Shadow" and "Hell House" for SPN.</p><p> <em>The kid runs the table balls to the wall, sinks shot after shot by sheer force of will. Dean watches him along with half the bar, the kid a better show than the crap on TV. The kid knows it, too. He smirks and sneers, plays the crowd like a pro, ramps up the charm to counter the scorn rolling off him in waves. He’s eighteen, nineteen maybe, hair long and spiked, cheeks still flushed with baby fat, but the chip on his shoulder screams decades, a life too long and hard, and Dean sees himself in years gone by. Or what he would have been without Sam.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Of All the Gin Joints

**Author's Note:**

> Another older fic uploaded to AO3 due resurgent VM love at all the movie news and my accompanying marathon of the show.

Cocky ass motherfucker.

The kid runs the table balls to the wall, sinks shot after shot by sheer force of will. Dean watches him along with half the bar, the kid a better show than the crap on TV. The kid knows it, too. He smirks and sneers, plays the crowd like a pro, ramps up the charm to counter the scorn rolling off him in waves. He’s eighteen, nineteen maybe, hair long and spiked, cheeks still flushed with baby fat, but the chip on his shoulder screams decades, a life too long and hard, and Dean sees himself in years gone by. Or what he would have been without Sam.

The kid leans over the table and knocks in the eight ball with a sweet slow grace that makes Dean whistle. The kid looks at him and stops, looks him over and then winks, and he misses the murder cast his way by the frat boys out two hundred a piece.

Dean slides off his stool and waits.

The kid bows to the crowd and blows imaginary smoke from his cue. He pockets the money, an easy grand when you got nothing to lose, and the boys divide and try to conquer. They lean into the kid with muscles and teeth bared, but the kid just rolls his eyes, been there, seen this heavy on his face. But his fingers flex around his cue, and Dean gets it. He sees. 

The kid came to fight, not hustle. He came to break bones and bleed a little, change out the scorn for pain and to try to feel something other than empty.

Dean gets it. 

“Double or nothing,” he says, and the boys look at him. The kid does, too. None appear pleased at the interruption. Dean saunters over anyway and grabs a cue from the stand, then he wedges himself between the kid and the frats. Frustration pins him in on all sides. The head boy gives Dean a once over. He takes in Dean’s leather and his scars, his wounds still fresh from Chicago, and his nostrils flare. He glances between Dean and the kid and he says to Dean, “This doesn’t concern you.”

“It does now,” Dean says. He chalks his cue, long slow steady strokes, nice and easy, nothing to fear, no reason to panic. He tosses off a smile at the gathered frats and says, “You can always kick his ass after I win, you know.”

The head boy frowns at Dean. “But then you’ll have our money.”

“No, he won’t.”

Dean ignores the kid. “Yes, I will.” The boys hesitate, drunk and confused, unsure about Dean but still thirsty for a fight. “Look,” he says, “you can wait at the bar, have a drink, work out a plan, whatever. I don’t care. Take ten minutes and then come back to kick his ass. Or,” he pauses, “you can start something now. With me.” 

He tosses the chalk back into the cup and waits. He lets the threat sink in and prays for a miracle, for some sense of self-preservation beneath their thick haze of liquor and pride. He knows that if he gets into another fight, this time over a punk kid with a pain in the ass complex, Sam will kick _his_ ass and that is just not good, not now, not at all, not even with an extra grand in his pocket to compensate. 

He looks at the furrowed faces and sighs. “Look, either way you leave here without your money—”

“My money.”

“ _My_ money,” Dean says over his shoulder. The kid rolls his eyes and Dean turns back to the boys. The ones in the back start to waver, the lure of the bar and Dean’s leather too many cons for them to go against. Dean reaches into his jacket, pulls out a couple twenties, and tucks them into the head boy’s hands. He says, “Nadine over there pours the best whiskey this side of the Texas. Go have yourselves a taste, watch the show. Like I said, I don’t care. Just go away or else I’m going to get cranky.” He leans in and squeezes the boy’s hands. Hard. “And believe me, you don’t want to see me cranky.”

“I do.”

Dean feels the kid smirk, still pushing for a fight, just now with him. He turns to glare and the kid grins at him, fucking _grins_ at him, honest to Christ amusement lurking under his threadbare cynicism. Dean draws in a breath and clenches his jaw; he resists the urge to smack the kid upside his head. No point in giving him what he wants. No good would come of it, nothing but blood and a couple of bruises, and violence never solved anything, least of all this. 

The kid holds his gaze under the glare. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t back down, and Dean would hesitate if he wasn’t so damn impressed. 

He turns back to the frats instead and finds them shuffled off. A few still glare their way from the relative safety of the bar, a couple at the kid and one at Dean, but they stay away, thank Christ. Dean wonders again just what the hell Sam saw in college with those assholes as the norm. Little punks Dean fought against all his life, the ones with their heads in the sand about what really went on in the world. Nothing to aspire to, but something Sam always wanted and still does, it seems.

Dean holds back a sigh at that, at dreams for normal and sleeping for a month, of everything being over, finished, finally, and he turns back to the kid. He’s over in the corner in the shadows by his beer. He smirks at Dean, takes a long pull from his bottle, and says, “So, do you play the knight in shining leather for all the boys or am I just special?”

“Special’s not quite the word I would use, but we can go with that.”

The kid stays silent for a moment. He looks at Dean, no smirk in sight, just a long steady look, and then he says, “You have no clue who I am, do you?”

“Nope. Should I?”

“Not unless you want your fifteen minutes.”

“I’d rather take my two grand if it’s all the same.”

“It’s not. You could make fifteen, twenty grand easy. More if you had a picture.”

“Of what?”

“Of me.” The kid steps away from the wall and cuts a swath through the smoke in the bar with a wide sweep of his arms. “‘Underage Son of Movie Star Murderer Aaron Echolls Caught Carousing a Bar of Ill Repute: Story at Eleven.’” The kid glances at Dean, waiting for something, a reaction of some kind, maybe. Dean keeps his face blank and the kid turns away and shrugs. He drains the last of his beer and says, “Kind of lame compared to everything else they’ve printed about me and the fam, but hey, you can’t have a salacious murder scandal every day.”

“I guess not.”

“Yeah. You’d guess.”

The kid stares down at his empty bottle. "I Feel Free" starts up in the jukebox across the bar, and he rolls his eyes and shares a look with Dean. Dean wonders just what the hell happened to the kid to bring him to this, to scamming drunken frat boys out of their easy earned money in the ass end part of Oklahoma. He wonders, but he doesn’t ask, the personal revelation portion of the evening usually conducted by Sam. 

He glances at the empty table instead and raises a brow. The kid looks, too. He blinks once then looks back at Dean and says, “And mess up the felt?” The innuendo clings to his voice like the gel in his hair, and Dean knows it’s a challenge, a test of the limits, his patience. It would probably work, too, if it was anyone other than Dean on the receiving end. 

Dean just folds his arms and says, “Rack the balls,” and the kid smiles, gleeful, dirty mind on proud display. He opens his mouth to retort, but Dean cuts him off with a, “You say what I think you’re about to say and the state of the felt is the last thing you’ll be worrying about tonight.” 

The kid closes his mouth, but the goddamn grin stays, suggestive even in the silence. Dean slides off his jacket with sure hands, and the kid watches him, his eyes dark above that fucking grin. Dean reaches for his cue again and leans back against the wall, waiting, glancing at the table and then at the kid. The kid blinks and his grin turns sharp. He rolls his beer bottle in his hands and says, “I don’t need to be saved, you know.”

He looks back up, and Dean sees a dog in a cage, teeth bared in a careless grin. He holds the kid’s stare, and he gets it. He sees. Day after day of staring at the dark shitty underside to the world, and sometimes you want to just rage and swear and fight and take control of the pain, revel in the hate, even for just a moment. But the moments always fade. They fade, and the next morning the world still looks the same, still dark and shitty, still hard and angry. 

Dean looks away. Thin scars crisscross the knuckles of his hands. He gets it. But sometimes you need more than you want, need to know that there’s something different than just rage and pain, even for just a moment. For just a night. 

He tosses his jacket onto an empty stool and slips a grin onto his face, one cocky and sure. “I wasn’t planning on saving,” he says, looking back at the kid. “I was planning on taking. A grand goes a long way, especially on whiskey. But, if you’re too scared, you can always—”

“I’m not scared.”

The kid stares at Dean through the smoke and the hard rock blaring from the jukebox in the corner. The name rings a bell now, Echolls, Aaron Echolls and his son, Logan, the girlfriend killed with a disgruntled employee to blame. Dean remembers reading the reports, his computer flagged for everything sinister on the coast of California, the northern and the southern parts. His father went out shortly after the girl’s death, to investigate, he said, but Dean knows it was just to see Sam.

Dean gets that, too.

He lifts a hand, signals Nadine behind the bar. She reaches for the whiskey, pours two glasses, and the kid watches, wary. Nadine ambles over, sets the glasses on the table by the wall. She winks at Dean and smiles at the kid, and Dean picks up his glass and waits. The music changes again, Cream fades into the Allman Brothers. The kid eases up to the table and Dean. He grabs his glass, lifts it, looks at the liquid, that cocky ass glint back in his eyes. Then he says, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” and Dean just shakes his head and sighs.

*

Fin.


End file.
